Portland Center Stage premieres 'The Body of an American,' a drama of trauma, trust and healing

Patrick WeishampelDanny Wolohan as Dan O'Brien and William Salyers as Paul Watson in the world premiere of "The Body of an American" follow the photographic evidence of war in search of understanding.

Paul Watson took a photograph that changed the course of history.

During the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, as U.S. Army Rangers engaged in a protracted and very deadly urban skirmish with Somali militia fighters -- the incident dramatized in the movie “Black Hawk Down” -- Watson, then a reporter for the Toronto Star, came upon a jeering mob dragging the mutilated corpse of an American soldier through the streets.

He took a picture.

The next year, that photo earned him the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography. But that doesn’t mean he was happy he snapped the photo. For one thing, response to the photo reportedly convinced President Clinton to withdraw U.S. troops from Somalia, a development Watson believes emboldened the fledgling al-Qaeda, leading to the serial tragedies of the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But Watson also claims that as he was taking the photo, he heard the voice of the dead soldier, Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland, say to him, “If you do this, I will own you forever.”

O’Brien’s play is partly about Watson’s attempt to reconcile his actions with the perceived threat of Cleveland’s ghostly voice. It’s partly about what it means to live a life and career predicated on trouble and tragedy. And it’s partly about the forging of trust between two scarred individuals -- Watson and O’Brien himself.

“To me, what connects every moment is the nexus between experiencing or witnessing trauma and then healing,” says Bill Rauch, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director up from Ashland to direct the play. “It really is, I think, about the relationship between trauma and healing, the possibilities and limitations of that.”

In order to get at such a broad yet interwoven agenda, O’Brien has written the play for two actors, who must not only portray the war reporter and the playwright who wants to write about him, but a couple dozen other minor characters. And though each actor primarily plays one of the two central parts, each at times speaks the lines of the opposite character. That is, a set of lines might all be from the character called Paul Watson, but the script calls for both actors to say them, alternating line by line.

“Part of my attraction, part of why I accepted the job, was that I read it and had no idea how to direct it -- I was completely flummoxed,” Rauch says.

O’Brien has been on hand for some of the rehearsals to help sharpen the theatrical vision of the premiere, so to speak, and Rauch also credits the collaborative input of scenic designer Christopher Acebo, dialect coach Mary McDonald Lewis and Jim Ingalls, who he says is “one of the greatest lighting designers in the world -- that can sound like hyperbole, but in this case it’s just fact.”

Even so, he says the “two biggest assets we’ve had in the room” have been actors William Salyers and PCS regular Danny Wolohan, who undertake what Rauch calls ‘the dance” of building trust between their sometimes shifting characters.

"What races through our minds and emotions is not always neat and linear,” Rauch says of O’Brien’s experimental approach. “I’ve grown to really believe in this as the right form for the story. I think what he’s after is trying to capture what it feels like to have post-traumatic stress disorder. What it feels like to be haunted.”